New claimants seek to sue Elon Musk’s xAI after Labour MP’s test case | Grok AI
New plaintiffs have come forward to take legal action against Elon Musk’s company xAI after Labor MP Jess Asato launched a test case against the firm over degrading sexually explicit material created by its Grok AI tool.
A handful of complainants contacted Asato’s lawyer on Thursday in response to the lawmaker’s decision to sue Musk’s company for damages over its display and distribution of fake photos of her in a bikini and an AI-generated video showing she was “chloroformed and ready for sexual assault.”
Ravi Naik, legal director at law firm AWO, said he was already acting on behalf of “multiple individuals” hoping to file a lawsuit against Musk’s company over derogatory, non-consensual content created by Grok. He said many of the plaintiffs had difficulty convincing X to remove the images until they received legal support.
“This is a test case on liability for AI developers. Just like if you are an architect and you construct a building, you are also responsible for that architecture,” Naik said of the claim filed on behalf of Asato in the high court in London. “Those who build and deploy AI models are making design choices about how those models work. This will be the case, considering responsibility for the decisions in those design choices.”
The claim alleges that xAI violated data protection law by allowing the images to be created and breached Asato’s private information.
The bikini trend went viral in January when Grok created nearly 3 million sexualized images on Musk’s platform in less than two weeks, which researchers said “became an industrial-scale machine for the production of sexual exploitation materials.” The AI tool allowed users to alter online images of real people with requests such as “put her in a bikini” or “take off her clothes.”
Musk’s company then placed the technology behind a paywall, limiting the chatbot’s ability to fulfill users’ requests to generate sexualized images.
Asato said he wants the legal action to show that “AI companies are responsible for the design choices they make when bringing their products to market.”
He said: “Engineers and Elon Musk had guardrails they could have put in place to stop Grok from creating sexualized images, but they decided not to put those guardrails in place. I hope my legal action will help rein in tech companies and remind them that they cannot act with impunity.”
She said she found the experience of seeing fake, non-consensual mugged photos of herself “psychologically distressing.” “This gets to the heart of understanding what it means to not consent to something that literally strips your clothes off and leaves you defenseless,” he said.
When she complained about the damage caused by the Grok trend in January, she received a number of abusive responses from commenters on X. One of these was shared by Musk, and a user posted an AI-generated video of himself apparently being drugged with chloroform in response to his retweet.
“Musk actually increased the hatred towards me, which led to the truly horrific video,” he said. “As an elected politician in the UK, he could have made different choices about how he and his company approached the fact that I said I felt humiliated and distressed by what his product did.”
On Thursday, Asato was subjected to more verbal abuse about X in response to her announcement of legal proceedings, including a new AI-generated image of her naked self in a bikini, created using a different tool.
Keir Starmer said Asato was “absolutely right” to take legal action against xAI over the “disgusting” images it created.
The legal action comes amid growing sensitivity over Musk’s interference in Britain’s internal affairs, following a series of posts commenting on the billionaire’s police response to the murder of Henry Nowak.
Business secretary and former technology minister Peter Kyle said it was important for British politicians to be “assertive” in holding Musk to account over the content on his platforms, noting that Musk has “taken a much more active and extreme role in British politics”.
“Musk is a complex and extreme person. He is an extremely successful innovator and commercializer of innovation, but he also has extremely personal views,” Kyle said.
xAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Additional reporting by Jessica Elgot
